Tuesday, September 29, 2009

1. The really, REALLY drunk one who staggers up to you, lightly snogs your cheek and tries to talk about how sad it is that the two of us don't hang out anymore, regardless of whether you've met her before tonight or not.

2. The one who thinks her boyfriend is dancing with too many other girls and ends up crying in the bathroom at 11pm.

3. The one who has tickets on herself because she looks good in lycra, drinks too much, eats nothing and winds up faux-lesbian dancing on the the dance floor under the shocked gaze of aged relatives.

4. The one who is also getting married in a few months time and won't stop telling you All About It, even when you try to pretend you've passed out in your soup.

5. The one who arrives with a shocking case of hayfever and spends the entire ceremony snuffling her way through a packet of Kleenex while her right eye slowly turns red and balloons to twice its usual size, ultimately losing her sense of taste altogether and overcompensating by self medicating from the bar. Oh no, wait, that was just me at a wedding on Sunday night. That's a once off.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

I'm sorry Guardian: I'm a big fan of the paper. But this necklace, which appears unde the headline "The easy way to make jewellery" on the paper's Life & Style pages is the ugliest motherfucking thing I have ever seen. Who would ever want to see it, or wear it, let alone learn how to MAKE it??

Coming up next in the Guardian's exciting installement of Things I Never Ever Ever Wanted to Know: "How to get buggered by a flashlight"...

1. Adding that second load of (awesomely fresh and crazily tasty) butter onto my bread at lunch today.2. Eating bread at lunch today.3. Eating pasta along with that bread.4. Secretly adding a little butter to the pasta.5. Ordering wine.6. Ordering more wine.7. Conceding there really was very little point in leaving such a small amount in the wine bottle.8. hjfh&$(234935jf&$*$*$*zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Sunday, September 20, 2009

The cheese souffle I ate on Friday night. I'm so sorry, my little ramekin of joy: truly I did defile you in about 5 minutes but I think you have to take some of the blame for being so goddamn delicious. Saucy bitch.

Oops, sorry Mum. And sorry too to my sister, who has recently been saddled - sorry blessed - with child. But to everyone else: just shut it.

I'm over it. I'm over hearing about how hard it is being pregnant, how painful it felt to have that 9 pound bundle of blood and flesh ripping your pink bits to shreds and, above all, I'm over hearing about the difficulties involved in raising a child.

Admittedly, as a childless spinster, I have absolutely no leg to stand on. AND YET. The thing is, mothers, you can talk about how tough it is, how exhausting, mentally and physically training etc until you're blue in the face and in need of a lie-down. But at a certain point in the argument I think we all have to sit down and acknowledge one simple fact: that billions, no trillions, no maybe even trillions of trillions of people do it. All the time. Smart women do it, stupid women do it, poor women do it, rich women do it. Even poor old bloody Jade Goody did it, and while I hesitate to speak ill of the dead, my instinct is to suggest that there's nothing Jade Goody did that couldn't be achieved by, say, a well trained monkey.

The trigger for this very unkind rant is the media coverage surrounding tennis star, Kim Clijsters, who last week capped off a stellar professional comeback by storming to victory in the US Open. Clijsters has also - if you haven't heard - managed to achieve said victory while being a Mum at the same time. Yawn. That yawn is not directed at Clijsters' blistering performance but at the increasinglyhystericalcoverage surrounding her achievement. The gist of which appears to be shock that a 26-year-old mother could achieve anything more difficult than putting oneleg in front of the other. Yes, we get it: she got knocked up and succeeded in not preventing the thing, 9 months later, from slipping out. It's a worthy achievement but can we get back to talking about tennis?

This hysteria culminated in a piece in the UK paper The Times (apologies, I've mislaid the link) which somewhere along the line delivered this pearler: "Winning a tennis match is a doddle compared with childbirth."

As the brilliant David Mitchell put it in his column over at The Guardian: "I'd say it very much depends on whom you're playing... while bringing up a baby and winning a Grand Slam may feel equally impossible, intellectually I know which I'm most likely to succeed at. I mean, I've got friends with kids and some of them used to try to light fags off an electric hob."

The list of hugely successful male tennis stars who have kids is massive (among them Pete Sampras and Borris Becker) but I've never seen a headline reading "SUPER DAD" above a photo of Sampras' grinning, victorious head. I know it's a bit different, given the effect of childbirth on a woman's body, but still... really? I'm prepared to be truly dazzled by anyone who can reach the peak of his or her professional career, even in a sport I find as meh as tennis, but am I prepared to heap praise on someone for achieving exactly what a heifer in a field can do? Not yet.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

There's something a little bit filthy about fancying Joseph Gordon-Levitt that stems from having watched him grow up on 3rd Rock From the Sun.

It's been 8 years since he played that role as a long-haired smart-mouthed teenager but I still think of him as a little kid, despite the fact he's popped up in a handful of alternately cute and rather good indie movies since, such as the underrated school noir movie Brick and 2004's Mysterious Skin. (And yes for the purpose of this argument I am overlooking the fact he plays the Cobra Commander in the film GI Joe: The Rise of the Cobra. Oh dear). He's also got some pretty impressive genes, based on the fact that he does not appear to have aged a single day in the past five years. Seriously, where is this dude sleeping - in a freaking cryogenics chamber?

All of which probably goes to explain why it feels a bit wrong to find myself a) oggling him in his latest movie, the cute-but-flawed 500 Days of Summer, and b)tapping him as my latest token smokin' hottie. Nevertheless, I could not resist because here's the shocking thing about Joseph Gordon-Levitt: he's a bloody year older than me.

What an outrage.

Far from being a cute little scrap of jail bait, JGL is practically An Older Man. Forget thinking about him as your best friends cute little brother who you secretly fancy like mad even though you pretend to agree with your friend that he's really annoying. No, JGL is more like your older brother's best friend, who you have fancied for years and for whose benefit you pretend to be acquainted with a vast variety of bands and books you have never heard of, let along heard/read.

I feel I've diverged from my point ever so slightly but I think you get where I'm coming from: he's talented, he's cute and he's definitely legal.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Thursday, September 3, 2009

I’ve posted about this website before but it’s so charming I can’t resist. The challenge is to summarise a novel in 25 words or less. There is some utter shit but also some gold. Some of my favourites:

1. Don't let a borderline alcoholic psycho run a hotel built on an Indian graveyard. It's just asking for trouble. (The Shining, Stephen King)

2. Little guys go to a lot of trouble to get rid of stolen jewellery. (The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkein)

3. Don’t fear the reaper (The Outsider, Albert Camus)

4. Man goes OTT concocting story as to why he was late home from the pub (Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift)

5. Giant walking deadly poisonous plants are a disaster, don’t you know! (Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham)

6. Bloke having mid life crisis discovers politics and shagging; but then learns to settle down and become a normal, respectable, member of society (1984, George Orwell)